


Beast of America

by baudlairean



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Child Abuse, Changing POVs, Dissociative Identity Disorder, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, OR IS HE, Slow Burn, Swearing, WIP, Warnings May Change, a cliched story of two boys an obscurus and another boy and no pizza place, credence barebone has a spitfire in there somewhere, i am mysterious, i believe in writing the weird ass fic you want to see in the world so here we are, i essentially ship newt and everyone, obscurials doing it for themselves, one of those credence makes it into the case fix-it fics without the fix-it, only the best for the barebone children, queenie is kind of my hero, sturm und drang, tends to be a lot of swearing in my stuff, that one where credence gives himself a new hairdo IMMEDIATELY, that one where the obscurus is a confident asshole, this tag section exists to please me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 16:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9393836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baudlairean/pseuds/baudlairean
Summary: "Vengeance is mine,” he says, to the dark racks and gleaming counter-tops. “And I will repay, says the lord.”You, with the miraculous, live on behind the line of quarantine. You are real. Real as guilt, real as fear, real as rage.OR; Credence Barebone is the most wanted man in the Magical United States. He is on a boat to London. He is in Newton Scamander's room. And he is still hiding one more secret - one very confident alternate personality.





	1. make or mar

When the toys float, he is five, and you are six, because he has decided that someone older will be better to play with. The toys aren’t much - small wooden blocks carved with letters of the alphabet, and wooden animals from noah’s ark. Most of the paint has rubbed off them, and they smell like smoke. They came from another house in the neighborhood - Mary Lou received them as a donation, after that family died in a house fire.

The family burned, she tells the boy, for their vanity. They installed heathen electricity, and they covered their windows with _velvet draperies_. The wires shorted and the drapes caught fire, and their home burned to the ground. All who violate god’s laws will be punished in such a way. She gives him the toys and says; here the righteous do benefit, here they receive the fruit of god’s works. She does not smile when she talks this way, but she glows with the power within her, God’s light incarnate.

The boy plays with alphabet blocks and with the worn, small wooden figures. He likes the lion best, with its roughly carved mane, small abstract spikes around its head like a halo. He is alone in the attic room for hours while his ma canvases the neighborhood.

She is nowhere near when the toys float in the air, spinning slowly, and the boy needs someone to blame. He blames you.

Guilt can create life. Shame builds things into reality, and fear, fear is as tangible as building blocks, as wooden animals.

The boy is five when he blames the floating toys on you. He is six when his mother almost sees him scaling the side of the house, light as a feather, to avoid her lash for being late for dinner. He is seven when she catches him holding a candle flame, miraculous light, in his cupped hands for warmth on a cold winter night when she will not heat the attic room. He thinks he has found the light she talks about - God’s light on earth. He tentatively asks, _Ma, is it a miracle?_

After that night, nothing floats, nothing moves, and nothing shifts in the night. You, with the miraculous, live on behind the line of quarantine. You are real. Real as guilt, real as fear, real as rage.

 

_two am, new york city_

  
Newt never thought he would regret leaving New York, but here he was, regretting. Queenie baked them all a lemon tart (his favorite, and he didn’t wonder how she guessed) for dessert after their final meal together. Its surface quivered every time a train passed outside the window. At least, it did until they devoured every slice.

Their goodbye dinner was a quieter affair than it might have been otherwise. They were not only wishing Newt good luck on his journey - they were spending the night saying farewell to a lost friend.

The three of them drank to him, clinking cups of bootleg gin. “It’s illegal,” Tina informed them, in case they’d forgotten. She shrugged one shoulder. “But. It feels like the right thing tonight.” Always the officer of the law. She enjoyed the gin as much as her sister, but Queenie, Newt noted, held her liquor considerably better.

Queenie was sitting comfortably on the couch, Tina’s head was leaning against the window, and they were all trying not to laugh too loudly. It was very late, after all, and they had male company. The day had been long even by Newt’s estimation, even measured against his nights spent with dragons during the war. On those nights, he spent hours putting out fires and feeding heavy hunks of bleeding meat to creatures ten times his size until his back ached. Today was comparable. This was the end of their private campaign.

“What’re you going to do?” Tina asked. “When you’re in England again.”

Queenie held up a finger, narrowing one eye, and Tina slapped her on the shoulder. “Quit it!” A little too loud, thanks to the gin. “No reading thoughts. I want to hear it from...the lips of our guest.” She chuckled.

Newt tipped his head, briefly, and sipped at his own cup. He’d only had the one or two drinks. Most likely. He hardly ever touched the stuff, and it was best to take things slowly. How many drinks was it the last time before he started playing show and tell with the more dangerous creatures in his case? There was that incident with the mercenary from Austria-Hungary -

“Finish my book,” he said, with a smile. And he laughed, suddenly, which made Tina smile at him, sudden and fresh as morning. Had he ever laughed in front of her before? “I don’t know where all of this fits in it, but it must fit somewhere.”

“Aw, you oughta stay,” Queenie said, leaning forward. “You could stay here! We got plentya room for a guy who fits in a suitcase.” She beamed. When they were both smiling, these dissimilar sisters looked very alike indeed.

“I couldn’t. Intrude, I mean. I could stay. If I could, but I can’t.” Newt looked into his cup. “Ah - I would stay, but I don’t want to intrude, and I can’t stay anyway, because I have a few more cases to follow up on. The book wouldn’t be complete without a Veela section, you see, and I have it on good authority that a man in Yorkshire -”

“Ah, well.” Queenie gave her sister a nudge with her shoulder, nearly jostling her away from the window. “You change your mind, there’s always room in the cupboard for that casea yours. We got hot coffee every morning, and usually there’s something good to eat. If you wanted to stay, that is.” How did she get her eyes to twinkle like that? “Which you _don’t_. Cause you said so.”

“I do,” he said, apologetic. “But I can’t.” He downed the rest of the gin. He didn’t say, _I made my first friend yesterday, and lost him. I came to America to set a creature free, and saw one killed first._

Queenie frowned at him, but didn’t say anything. Tina was already long gone, blinking slowly. The were spending the night laughing, because that’s what you did when a day was so good and so bad.

Human beings. Immensely complicated creatures.

“We’ll see you off in the morning,” said Tina. Impetuously, she reached out and pinched his cheek, and her face scrunched in glee. “I’ve been wanting to do that since the minute I met you. Doesn’t he have such pinchable cheeks, Queenie?”

“He does.” Beaming again. “Bedtime, kiddies!”

 

Newt and the sisters left the apartment at the crack of dawn the next morning. He never made it back to the case after they polished off the lemon tart and the bottle of gin. When he awakened on the sofa, he found his jacket and waistcoat freshly washed and pressed. “You really can hold your liquor,” he blurted, amazed, as Queenie passed them to him.

“You think I ain’t lived a life before you came to New York, Mr. Scamander?” Every bit of her shimmered with amusement, but there was a little wetness at the corner of her eyes. She had lost something real in the last day as well, but something told Newt that such a formidable person would not take it lying down. “Now go on.”

 

They walked, the three of them together, as far as the MACUSA building. “Plenty to do today,” Queenie said, and she planted a firm kiss on Newt’s cheek before breaking away. She was wearing lavender oil under her hair somewhere, emanating from her body in a cloud of scent. Newt thought, not unappreciative, of the scent-marking habits of some creatures he knew. Would Jacob always find himself stopping short whenever that scent came to his nose, not knowing why?

“Lots of paperwork needs doing. No thanks to you, mister!” She waved the pair of them on, turning her face away quickly, and reached into her coat pocket for a handkerchief as she ran up the steps.

“Your sister is…”

“Yes.” Tina said. She looked up at him, with a small smile. “Yes, she is.”

 

The walk to the docks was long, but they chose to take it on foot all the same. Neither of them had any real interest in apparating their way across the city. They took a leisurely route, and they talked about nothing at all, only walked in each other’s company, close enough that their coats occasionally brushed, sleeve on sleeve.

On the way, they walked past an absolutely enormous building - by muggle standards, anyway. The windows were filled with displays and mannequins in exaggerated poses, draped in finery and standing in exotic landscapes. One appeared to be riding a camel, of all things. “What is this place?”

“Saks, I think they call it.” Tina gestured to a few other buildings dotting the street. “They’re called department stores. Keep making them bigger and bigger every couple years. That one just went in, and the no-majs show up in droves.”

As they drew closer, Newt realized that the crowd he saw clustering around the doorway was actually being held back at the door. Finely dressed New Yorkers were out on their usual business of shopping, but muggle officers of the law were blocking the way.

“Not from last night,” he said, turning to her. Raw adrenaline had rode roughshod over panic the night before, but now fear flushed through him again. Had more damage been done that they had missed?

Tina shook her head. “Robbery, most likely. Places like that catch all the wrong kinds of attention.”

They moved around the edge of the crowd, sliding through. The doorman, in a scarlet uniform with a small name badge on his chest, was shouting to the crowd. “Any items left in the store safe have already been checked and accounted for.” To an inaudible question, the man shook his head. “I don’t know when the store will be open, ma’am. We‘re at the mercy of the NYPD, and there’s repairs after that.”

They couldn’t know how small a robbery was compared to the war they could be staring down this morning. It was almost reassuring to Newt to hear the panic and annoyance of shoppers complaining that their favorite store was closed. The crowd of people, men and women, old and young, clamored for a look through the windows. All Newt could see was some broken glass on the floor, and the occasional flashbulb of a law enforcement officer taking photographs.

Tina, however, had an odd look on her face. She was a little red in the cheeks, head turned to the street.

Newt couldn’t resist, despite not typically being one to pry. “What is it?”

Her cheeks darkened a little more. “Macy’s is just down the road.” She lifted her head. “When I was a teenager, I...stole a barrette. From the jewelry department. Snatched it into my pocket with my wand, you know. But I took it back, right away, I barely got three steps out the front door.” She bit her lip. “I was never really meant for a life of crime. Not even stealing from a no-maj store.”

“I steal things all the time,” Newt said, as they round the corner.

“What?”

His mouth was turned down, and he tried not to smile. “Creatures, mostly.”

“Oh.” She nudged him with her shoulder, an uncharacteristic gesture that reminded him of her drunken pinch the night before. “That doesn’t count, Mr. Scamander. You steal things that are being mistreated. You take them home, or make them better. There’s no crime in that.” He risked a glance at her, and found himself meeting her gaze. “I could even...admire that sort of thing.”

The warmth of her words carried them all the way to the docks, and through their farewells.

 

_that morning, two am_

A dark figure stumbled through the fourth floor window of Saks Fifth Avenue, directly into the accessories department. ‘Through’ did not here mean not mean ‘climbed’ - he materialized, tripped forward on a wrinkle in the carpet runner, and fell directly onto a glass display case.

It crashed into the ground with a horrific sound, shattering the quiet of the store after dark. He didn’t know what could be inside, but it was _loud_. The contents clattered and skidded like marbles, bouncing off the carpet and striking stone. Glass sprayed everywhere.

He held still, waiting. Sure enough, footsteps clattered up the stairwell, and a flashlight swung into sight.

“Alright there, hold still and there’ll be no need to-”

From where the shape was huddled between the racks and the cases, something whipped out and struck the watchman in the chest. His flashlight went one way and he went the other, one spinning forward as the other was slammed back. He hit the wall and fell to the floor, face down, limp.

The shade waited. Then it stood, unsteadily, and limped around the spray of broken glass, glinting in the thin light from the street.

The shape stood over the guard for a moment, shaking, then carefully pushed the guard over with one foot. The guard’s nose was bleeding freely, but his chest was moving. Breathing, but unconscious.

The shade repressed a small sob and found the wall with a hand. There were no other sounds on the stair. He was _safe_. He wanted, so badly, to sleep. ( _go to sleep now._ ) His stiff body was so tired. He realized now that he was inside a...store? It had to be a department store, a large one. The floor he stumbled into was enormous, and filled with vague shapes in the darkness that had to be racks of clothes.

He had never been inside a department store before, but it was quiet, and he couldn’t think about where he came from. So much of him was burned away ( _tired_ ) and he barely felt as if he was standing there at all. A strong wind might blow him to pieces ( _sleep_ ).

He slid to the floor beside the watchman. Sleep seemed irresistible. He couldn’t help it. ( _yes sleep_ ) He deserved a rest; he fought so hard, and there were so many of them _don’t think about it_ but he could hardly help it, he kept seeing them, the blurry black and white vision of them, dozens of angry faces _sorching_ him.

Panic threaded through him, and his head fell back against the stone. He wanted to cry from the exhaustion. _Sleep_ yes sleep. Sleep. Tomorrow, when he woke up, he would be back at the church. He would wake with the sheet being pulled from him by Mary Lou, as she did so many mornings. He could feel it even then, the phantom sensation of the sheet being roughly pulled from his cold body, his perception lightheaded and swinging, half-unconscious already.

He was dragged down. He fell _asleep,_ a tear trickling from the corner of his eye, sighing.

A moment later, the shape stood up.

He stood easily. There was no stiffness in his posture. He brushed the bridge of his palm brusquely against the corner of his eye, swiping the wetness away. He winged his shoulder back and cracked it, relieving some of the tension from stumbling into the case. He rolled his neck and cracked the tightness from it with a small grunt of pleasure.

He strode over to the flashlight on the ground and slotted it between his teeth. It shone a bobbing light on the wall as he rifled through the night watchman’s pockets. He flipped the watchman’s wallet open, and tilted his head to shine the flashlight on the card inside. Morty Reissman, Saks Night Watchman. “Cute,” mumbled the shade around the bulk of the flashlight in his mouth.

He pulled two tens and a few singles from the wallet and pocketed them, then dropped the wallet on the unconscious watchman’s body. He pulled the flashlight from his mouth, turning it off and flinging it to the side. He wouldn’t be needing it. The light helped him with fine details, but he could see perfectly well in the dark.

He turned, and saw that the overturned case was full of tie tacks, tiny and metal and clinking across the stone like marbles in the dark. He gave the spray a kick, sending a burst of them flying, jangling across the floor.

Now. Clothes were the first order of business.

 

Twenty minutes later the shade was taking the stairs to the first floor two at a time. He was clad in a thick wool coat, the richest and softest on the rack. It fell to his ankles and neatly clipped along the edge of the stairs, following faithfully behind his brand new dress shoes, shined to bristling brightness. There was a weighty pocket watch in his waistcoat, and a pair of leather gloves tucked in the pocket of the jacket under the coat. He looked

Pretty fucking good, if he did say so himself.

But there was room for improvement. Wasn’t there always?

In the corner of the first floor lay the barber shop, removed from the street and locked for the night. The internal locks in the store were nothing much to write home about. One good shoulder shove and the door popped, swinging open, and a heavy breath of barbasol and Brilliantine washed across him.

He had never been in a barber shop. Never been in a department store, either. He had been in speakeasies and houses of sin, anywhere nasty Mary Lou saw iniquity to preach to, but barber shops and department stores weren’t too high on her list. He did, however, know his way around a pair of scissors. Mary Lou expected perfection in grooming, and for the children to take care of the business themselves. The girls needed their hair cut, and his own always needed pruning to her exacting specifications.

He dialed up the lights. There were no windows facing the street, so why be coy? He plopped down into one of the chairs, kicked his feet up on the stand, and took a good long look at himself.

His face matched the photo on a wanted poster that would soon be cringing from viewers in every magical public house in the United States, but the face of Credence Barebone in the mirror didn’t look a thing, he thought, like the whipped whelp in some old photo of the Second Salemers. This boy leaned forward, pulling his lip down with a hooked finger, and surveyed the blood that has gathered in the gaps between his teeth. He licked a cut on his lip, sluggishly bleeding, and reddened them even further.

There was a large bruise on his cheekbone, split by a broad laceration. At least a week for that one to heal, which was nothing. His hands were still painful, healed only on the surface by that fucking two-bit traitor _magician_.

A black tendril, thin as a whip, slapped out of him and smashed the mirror. It collapsed into a pile of miniature shards.

The boy pulled the barber’s razor from its sheath at the edge of the counter and turned its edge up, examining it closely. Sharp enough for the job. He grabbed a tin tube of shaving cream, stood, and walked to the sink at the end of the row.

 

The remade man walked out of the barber shop a few minutes later, reaching up to _ting_ the bell with a bare finger before kicking the door shut behind him. He smelled like the most expensive aftershave in the cabinet, and he felt better.

He was dead on his feet, though. That wasn’t just a put-on or something. He was exhausted. He felt like he ought to sleep for a week, and he was pretty sure he was done with New York. If he wasn’t done with it, it was definitely done with him. He thought of the church, of the girls. They were alive, and after what happened - yeah. After what happened, they were better off without him.

“Vengeance is mine,” he said, to the dark racks and gleaming countertops. “And I will repay, says the lord.”

His voice echoed a little. He tapped his foot.

“But, he didn’t.” The shade lifted his head. “The lord didn’t. So I did.”

A thin black shape, formless and loose as smoke, began to drift out from him in a wave. The room was full of counters, beautiful and locked, all of them, filled with nice things for rich people. Cosmetics for the ladies, hats and glasses, pretty things and expensive, diamonds and pearls.

The wave, barely visible in the smoky light filtering in from the street, cracked the glass as it passed over it. The glass splintered, as if under pressure. It spiked through with deep cracks and gashes.

All around the room, cases began to shatter. One after another, they exploded in spatters of shining light and splattered goods. The popped like shining eggshells, squeezed from the outside by the half-visible layer of grey smoke. Bracelets and necklaces were thrown from their mounts. Bottles toppled and crashed.

He nudged a silver necklace with a well-polished toe. The case upstairs, the mirror, this whole floor of pretty things. Soon enough, everything in reach.

 

By the time he walked out onto the roof it was almost dawn, and there wasn’t a rack, a stitch of clothing, a door, a lock, and piece of paper behind him that hadn’t been shredded, busted, snapped, or rended. He tore the insides of of beauty and money into a bomb scene, debris everywhere. Even without the strength to tear the building down itself, he could still make his presence felt.

He was never able to do this before, just release himself into the wild. There was no one to hide from, no one who would try to burn him out of his hiding place, no one who would call a cringing boy possessed and grab the fireplace poker for a little old fashioned exorcism. He wasn’t just around to take the punishment, now, or to taste rebellion on the sly. This world was as much his as it anyone else’s, and he reveled in the sensation of breathing alone instead of watching from backstage. They could fix the buildings and pretend none of it happened, but it did.

His thin body leaned against the doorway. The sun was peeking over the horizon, and it was time to be gone. His form grew indistinct, blurred at the edges, melted. He drifted toward the docks like a black thread, carried by the wind.

 

Somewhere, a seagull cried. Credence blinked.

He was looking at a scratchy blue wool blanket, but he was wrapped in something smoother and softer. He smelled salt. He lifted his head.

He was in a small room, only big enough to hold a cot and a coat rack, both bolted to the floor. There was a porthole in the wall, open to the sea air. Based on the thin layer of seawater on the floor, the latch had been hanging open for some time. The walls were whitewashed iron, studded with rivets.

He sat up, shrugging his coat closer around himself.

What was he wearing? He extended a hand to look at the heavy fabric covering him to the wrist. The coat was dark wool and softer than anything he’d owned in his life. It clung to his skin like silk. A quick check of the rest of his clothes told him they weren’t familiar either. His hands, however, were still his hands, unchanged - bruised at the knuckles, spattered with scars and welts. The right, held in the left, was shaking.

He took a slow breath, closed his eyes. He was on a boat. _Ma will be -_

But ma was dead. The memory hit him like a blow, and he choked, turning his face into the pillow on the cot. Ma was dead, and the girls were back in New York, and he was on a boat going somewhere else without even knowing why -

The door to the small room swung open.

The man in the doorway wore a blue coat, a brown waistcoat, and a shock of ginger hair wafted up at odd angles from his head. He stood very still, holding the knob in his right hand and a leather case in his left.

“Ah.”

Credence did not move a muscle. His jaw was clenched so tightly that Newt could see the muscles in his cheeks jump and twitch.

They stayed like that for a little while, staring at each other, before Newt set his case down gently on the floor and moved toward Credence. He shrank closer to the wall. Newt stopped, then closed the door partway.

“Credence, I think.” He offered his hand, only reaching half the distance he might. He was mild - even cordial. “We were never formally introduced.” He cleared his throat. “My name is Newt Scamander. I am a friend of Porpentina Goldstein. Good morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, I wrote a ten chapter outline. This never happens.
> 
> I have two chapters of this fic written. I started thinking about what happens to a boy barely out of his teens who suppressed not just teenage rebelliousness, but joy, hope, and rage around trauma, so much that it created a nightmare. I thought - "that sounds like a pretty textbook way to wind up with a dissociative disorder."
> 
> Some caveats:
> 
> 1\. I am not a Harry Potter fandom expert. I do my best to do my research, but if I get it wrong in the search for a fun story, please forgive.  
> 2\. I have a passion for this time period, but again, I'm not an expert.  
> 3\. I had a working playlist for this I won't bore you with, but [a wolf at the door](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvBPCm25z4I) was on in heavy rotation for chapter one.  
> 4\. Chapter two should hopefully go up tomorrow, if I finish editing it by then.  
> 5\. Comments are this weird extra food I subsist on in addition to regular food. They are succor to me. Mmmm.  
> 6\. Tumblr is [here](http://baudlairean.tumblr.com/). Come for the Fantastic Beasts stay for the constant nonsense. Tumblr post for this chapter is [here](http://baudlairean.tumblr.com/post/156125316600/fic-beast-of-america-ch-1-make-or).


	2. bad things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I done a bad thing and I'm paying for it all right now

Credence didn’t get up, or move, or breathe, really. Newt didn’t come any closer, nor did he shut the door completely.

They were at an impasse, one bound to continue unless Newt said something more. He didn’t quite make eye contact with the boy. He was busy looking at the porthole, slightly to Credence’s right. 

“Would you mind if I shut this door and set my case down, so that we may speak privately?” He gestured to the door, shuffling away from the entry. “I will not try to stop you, if you wish to leave.” A pause. “I doubt I could, even if I wanted to.”

“Because I’m dangerous?” asked the boy on the cot.

“Because you got in without a key.” A flickering smile. “I assume you can exit without one, also.”

Credence considered this, then nodded, once. His mouth was still rigidly set, and he has wrapped his arms around his chest.

“Thank you,” Newt says, and shuts the door. He sets his case on the ground, and settles on top of it, as comfortably as a thousand times before. 

From the moment Newt saw Credence laying on his cot, he was in problem-solving mode. He met Credence’s eye. This wasn’t like the subway. This was a human being, with all the difficulties that entailed. And yet, though it wasn’t the sort of thing one admitted to other people, it was still easier for him to engage with the boy if he thought of him as he had in the subway - where he was speaking to a magical being with no way to speak to its hurts than to destroy, rampaging after decades of abuse. 

Here was a creature who had hurt people, that the authorities had attempted to put down because they felt it was too dangerous to others to live. Thus, Newt’s job was as it had been many times before: to assess the future of this creature, and to try to set it up to succeed in front of those who felt the world would be better off without it. Newt tended to assess every creature’s outcome positively. He never could believe that putting one down, even the deranged ones, those so badly abused they could no longer tell friend from foe, was the right thing. There was always another way.

“Have you been to Britain?” he asked.

“What?” said Credence, eyes widening a little.

“Britain. Have you been?”

“No.” Credence pulled back slightly.

“That’s where we’re going.” Newt said, gently. “Did you know that?” Credence drew in on himself a little further. “You didn’t. You were only looking for a way out of New York.” 

Credence said nothing.

“Did you follow me onto the ship?”

Credence shook his head. He was staring out the porthole, watching the swerve of the horizon outside. “Well, all the same. You found me.” Newt smiled, just a little. “And you are a day’s sail from New York. I can’t say you are safe, Credence, but you are much safer than you were.”

Credence blinked, and then his shoulders sagged. He rested his forehead against one knee. “But you’ll tell them,” he said, hoarsely. “When we get to port. About me.”

Newt folded his hands across his knees. “What makes you think that?” he asked, softly.

“Because of what I did.” 

Newt leaned forward over his thin knees, laying his long hands over them. “Do you mind if I tell you a story?” 

Credence said nothing, his forehead still resting on his knee. He was still staring at the porthole, but every so often, he glanced at Newt out of the corner of his eye.

“I study and care for magical creatures. That is my vocation. You likely don’t know this, but there are a great many of them, and I have been travelling to find more - to learn about them, to protect them, to study them - for years. I have found creatures in every state of danger you can imagine, both to themselves and to others. When they come into contact with human beings...well, the results are unpredictable. Hardly their fault.

When I was travelling after the war, I met an elderly couple in Ireland. Their grandson was missing, and they blamed a creature they said lived in the lake outside their house. Fisherman had been claiming to spot something in there for decades, but no one believed them either. I heard about this lake, and the missing boy, and I went looking.”

I thought perhaps they had a water-dwelling creature in the lake. Something predatory, perhaps - or just something with a strong biological imperative to parent, which saw a vulnerable child alone on the shore and tried to take care of him.”

So I went looking for whatever it was that lived in the water. At worst, it had harmed the boy, or killed him.” Newt bobbed his head as he admitted the likelihood of the outcome. “At best, the boy was safe, and so was the creature.”

“And?”

Newt was surprised to hear Credence speak, no longer staring blankly at the porthole. “And there was no monster. I still don’t know what the fisherman saw. Nothing but driftwood, I suspect. What was at the bottom of their bottles,perhaps. But I found the boy. He had been hiding in a cave at the edge of the lake for weeks, out of sight of everyone. His grandparents...they were cruel to him. So he left and made a new den - sorry, a home for himself.” 

Newt smiled, wan. He could still see the boy in his mind’s eye, emaciated, subsisting on river grass and what he could scrounge from the water, smeared in mud and backing fearfully away from the tall man who leaned his head into the low cave.

“He told me his aunt and uncle lived in the next village, so I took him there, once I sorted whether they would be better for him than his grandparents were.” He shrugged. “I expect the fisherman still tell stories about the lake. They’re no more true now than they were before.”

“And the grandparents?” Credence was watching him intently, now, still wrapped around himself. “What happened to them?”

Newt squeezed his knees. “I made them forget. About their grandson. Not really my business but it seemed best for everyone if they never came near him again.”

“Made them forget?” Credence drew himself up, fearful. “What does that mean?” 

Newt extended a hand. “Nothing - or, well, something, but not something that hurt them.”

“But they never came after him.”

“No.” A twitch. “I checked.”

Credence slowly unfolded himself, just a little. It was a slow process, unbending his limbs and flattening his thin legs, bowing them out to sit cross-legged. Quietly, he asked, “Why did you tell me that story?”

“Because...I want you to know that I don’t send any creature back into an environment where I think they will be harmed. Not even if the law says I ought to.” Unexpectedly, even to him, Newt smiled. “I have a habit of stealing, you see.”

They stared at one another for a moment. The waves lapped at the window, the boat rocked, and a fresh spray of seawater sloshed up and over the edge of the window. It was a gray day outside, clouds as far as the eye could see. Fall was already upon them, and the sea air this late in the season bit through Newt’s clothes.

“Do you mind if I close that?” he asked. It would mean coming close to Credence, arms’ length.

Credence nodded, once.

“Thank you.” He stood and crossed to the window, shutting it with a firm pull. 

He might have closed the porthole with a simple wave of his wand, but he wanted to see whether he had earned the right to come within arm’s reach of Credence. It was a good sign - a start, anyway. Casual magic at this stage might only scare him, which probably made his move a terrible idea.

“You know Tina Goldstein,” Credence asked, finally, looking up at him. 

Newt dropped his hand from the window. “I do. I was with her at the underground. Do you remember?”

 

Credence didn’t know what that meant, ‘the underground,’ but he remembered _monochromatic flashes, splitting into a hundred thousand screaming splinters, burning and striking anything that moved_ and he flinched. “I think.”

Newt hesitated. “We could stay here,” he said. Credence lifted his head again. We? “Or we could go somewhere else.”

Credence stared. “We’re on a boat,” he pointed out, brow knitting together.

Newt lifted the case, placed it flat on the cot, and flipped open the latches.

 

Newt went down the ladder first, and it took fifteen minutes of indecision before Credence at last followed him down. Every fiber of his being screeched in Mary Lou’s voice when he looked at the case. _WITCHCRAFT._ A bottomless suitcase - if Credence hadn’t lived the horrors of the last month, he would think he had lost his mind.

If he was crazy, at least the bottom of the case was _fascinating_.

The door at the back of the shack was slightly ajar, showcasing a night sky somewhere beyond. The smell of wet earth permeated the small room, and drying wool, and strange plant matter. And tea, he thought. The room was positively bursting with interesting things to look at - exotic samples under magnifiers, half-written recipes for this or that remedy. Credence found himself leaning over a half-finished scrawl for something called _Swooping Evil’s Grace_. _Swooping Evil_. Something about the name resonated with him.

“Have you eaten anything?” Newt asked. He was fishing around in a cabinet that must be the pantry, based on the various canned goods falling out of it. “I don’t have much, but there is some fresh produce from the enclosures. I’m not much of a cook. But I could make something?”

Credence looked up through the spray of plants between them and nodded, minutely.

“Good,” Newt said. Credence wasn’t sure why, but Newt seemed to bounce between strong eye contact with him and staring somewhere past his head. He personally preferred it when Newt did the latter. When he met his eye, Credence felt as if he was seeing something that he didn’t want seen.

Newt began chopping vegetables, using a large, extremely clean knife, washing the produce under a water spout that turned on as he passed objects beneath it. No sign of a faucet - no faucet necessary, apparently. Credence was relieved that he recognized all the vegetables as ordinary, edible things like carrots and celery. “You have a farm?”

“Not quite,” Newt said, reddening slightly. “But some of the creatures leave excreta that make the ground extremely fertile.”

Did that mean what Credence thought it meant? He’d only ever eaten wilted produce from the grocery on the corner, and they sold the produce too spoiled or beaten to go to the nicer markets uptown. _Only the best,_ came the thought, unbidden and vicious and not quite in his own voice, _for the Barebone children._

Newt began slicing the carrots, still doing all the work by hand, and Credence backed up to sit on the small bed in the corner of the room. The sound of chopping and the smell of unfamiliar spices filled the air. For lack of anything better to do, he picked up a book sitting at the end of the bed. _Caring for the European Bowtruckle_ seemed to be some sort of pet care manual, if people kept odd stick insects as pets. When one of the creatures in an illustration _leaned_ around the edge of the tree it was camouflaged against, Credence almost dropped the book.

Newt looked over his shoulder. “Oh! That’s - yes, you wouldn’t have seen those. Muggle books don’t have moving pictures, do they?” His smile flickered, his eyes fixed on the bowtruckle in the book. It was now upside down and trying to read their expressions from the book’s pages.

“No,” Credence said, thickly. He gingerly pulled the book back into his lap. 

Newt hesitated, then went back to the soup.

Five minutes later, Credence looked up and saw a small table in the center of the room that had not been there when he began his reading, along with a pair of battered wooden chairs. “There,” said Newt, setting two bowls carefully at opposite ends. He seemed satisfied with his work.

The soup smelled alright enough. Credence was on his feet before he realized it, and he sat down in front of the steaming bowl with eyes for nothing else. His stomach growled. He had last eaten sometime...sometime...when was it? Lunch, a day ago. A piece of stale bread and some cheese from the cupboard. He had come to Chastity’s room to call her to supper when he found the toy wand beneath her bed. And then, after that?

Newt canted his head. “Credence?”

He looked up sharply. Newt paused. “Is the soup alright?”

Credence had been patiently waiting, but there would be no prayer before the meal, of course. He hesitated. Should he say his own?

After a moment, he gave in and dipped his spoon into the steaming liquid. He could see the chunks of carrot in it, but just one bite told him that it had been heavily overspiced. Too much rosemary, not enough of the other flavors to balance it. And Newt just threw the leaves in rather than crushing them for better fragrance and texture.

He didn’t care, not a bit. Instead of answering Newt’s question, or voicing his own strong opinions about spices in cookery, he absolutely inhaled the soup. Newt practically beamed, and Credence wondered if this self-proclaimed expert in ‘creatures’ looked at his animals the same way when they attacked a bowl of food.

There was no room to be proud, or worry about poison in the food. He was too hungry to do anything but eat. When he finished the bowl, he dutifully scraped the sides with the chunk of bread Newt had rested along the edge. That done, he laid his spoon down beside the bowl, face down, and folded his hands in his lap.

Newt looked so very happy that Credence couldn’t even begrudge it. Maybe the guy just didn’t get a lot of compliments on his cooking. “Would you like another bowl?”

Credence was dumbstruck. ”Another bowl?”

Newt’s expression softened. “Of course. I made a full pot.” He gestured to the tabletop stove, where the saucepan was still lightly bubbling with no sign of a flame. “There’s enough for you to eat as much as you like.”

Credence stood from the chair and took his bowl to the pot, filling it as high as he could without sloshing soup over the sides. Newt was now busy with his own meal again, pretending he didn’t notice Credence scrounging as much into the bowl as he could.

Credence ate his way through two more bowls of vegetable soup. He never mentioned the rosemary, nor did he care if it was overspiced. By the time the meal was over, he felt as if he would burst from all the food, and he was very, very tired. Did other people always feel this way after eating? He couldn’t remember ever finishing a meal without a growl still in the pit of his stomach.

Newt had finished his meal long ago, and now had a small leather book in front of him. He was busy writing away, adding fresh lines of notes under a sketch of something that looked like a canary with spider’s legs. Credence reached out to take Newt’s bowl, and he looked up. “Oh,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Credence froze. “Washing up?” It was wrong. He had done something wrong.

Newt’s smile reappeared. It reminded Credence of the times when he was alone with his sisters. They would smile at him that way, sometimes, when Mary Lou wasn’t hovering nearby. The feeling it gave him to see Newt do it, however, was very different.

The man produced a long wand from his pocket, and Credence took a short step back. Rather than apologize, or draw any attention to Credence’s reaction at all, Newt waved the wand in a small circle, and gestured to the cupboard.

The plates lifted from the table, and the pot on the stove scoured itself. Food detritus wiped itself away clockwise around the inside of the bowl, and disappeared as if it had never been. The bowls restacked themselves and floated into the cabinet, nestling neatly beside a pair of plates. The spoons slotted into a small wooden cup that held the knives and forks, and the cabinet shut itself.

Credence’s hands were buried deep inside his pockets, balled into fists. When he didn’t move or unknot himself, Newt said, “Did I frighten you?”

Credence shook his head.

Newt looked at him. “Your mother -” and he stopped. “That woman. She said witchcraft was poisonous, that it was for cursing people. Hurting them. But magic is… well, among other things, it’s for doing the chores.”

Credence’s eyes were fixed on the bowtruckle book. “Would you like to read for a while?” Newt asked. “I keep some creatures here, just through that door.” He stood from the table. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about from them. They rely on me to feed them, however, and I need to do that just now. Do you mind?”

The boy crossed to the bed and dragged the bowtruckle book into his lap. Newt paused for a moment at the door. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he said. _Please don’t go anywhere._

 

With the door shut behind him, Newt felt as if he could take a deep breath for the first time in hours.

Even for him, this was a risky proposition. Tina was the person with the strongest connection to Credence Barebone before the trouble in New York. Whatever had happened to push this obscurial boy over the edge and make him start striking out at such a late age, it wouldn’t be resolved by simply making him soup and hoping everything turned out for the best. He had met Mary Lou Barebone, if only briefly, seen the iron hold she had over her children. Her death didn’t make her disappear. Undoing the damage she had done to Credence’s psyche was a job for an alienist. Perhaps one with strong experience in defense against the dark arts. 

Credence should be somewhere safe, both for himself and for everyone else. Newt didn’t believe in the permanent imprisonment of any damaged or wayward creature, but in rehabilitation and re-release. Credence was nowhere near that stage. He had killed - not months ago, but _yesterday_. It would be a long path back, if the boy was capable of walking it at all.

“Boy,” he murmured to himself, moving into the darkened Mooncalf enclosure, picking up the pail of feed as he went. Credence couldn’t be many years younger than himself. When he was Credence’s age, he was just finished serving in the war, embarking on his travels for the first time. But Credence Barebone had, he guessed, never seen anything beyond the island of Manhattan - and very little of that.

Nor was Credence a project to embark on. As Newt tossed the feed to the chirruping Mooncalves, he had to remind himself for the hundredth time that Credence was not a wounded Manticore growling in a cage, but a human being. Newt never had been an expert in their care and feeding, let alone obscurial ones.

Feeding, watering, and soothing all the creatures took several hours. They were still a little on edge after the chaos in New York, not that he could blame them. It could be exhausting keeping them happy, but Newt wouldn’t have it any other way. By the time he was done, he felt more settled, some of his worst worries smoothed away. There were still days left between the mid-Atlantic and London, and as yet, no one had tied a face to the Obscurus that whipped through New York. In London, at least, Newt had contacts he could leverage for information and advice. If Credence was willing, he would help him come up with a solution. 

On Newt’s left, a dark shape drifted. He turned, and watched the Obscurus, aimless and trapped in its silvery containment field, shifting and roiling sluggishly in the icy cold of the arctic room.

Newt pushed the door to the shack open. “Alright, they’re all fed now. We could introduce…”

The room was empty.

Newt stroked a hand across his face. “Yes, well, that was to be expected.”

He took the rungs of the ladder two at a time.

 

Newt burst from his spare cabin so fast he almost knocked over an elderly couple returning to their cabin for the night. The husband clutched his wife closer, and the woman squalled in displeasure. “Sorry - sorry, just - so sorry!” He sprinted past them, coattails trailing rapidly behind.

So Newt had lost Credence. The Obscurial, a young man with enough power, even in what must be a weakened state after the battle in New York, to slice this boat in half and take down the thousand souls on it if he saw fit. Not a problem - he just had to find him. It would all be fine.

There was no sign of Credence anywhere in the winding hallways of Third Class, so the next stop was the the top deck for a bird’s eye view. Newt skidded to a stop across the hardwood when he reached the landing, peering down over the railing onto the decks below. They were getting into the season of late-afternoon sunsets, and it had just dipped before the horizon. It was too cold at sea this time of year for any but the hardiest to chance the buffeting winds for a night-time stroll. The decks below were nearly empty, and there was no sign of the top of Credence’s (lately shorn, Newt hadn’t had a chance to ask about that yet) head. 

Newt darted back into the stairwell and thundered down to second class. He slipped past stewards. He buffeted past young women on their way to the showers wrapped only in threadbare robes, who shouted and yanked at his jacket. He hopped over the back of a man bent into his toolcase, repairing a small leak (disturbing) in the outer hull. There was no time to think, to stop, to slow down. His object was finding Credence before someone upset him, or someone hurt him, and then he hurt the rest of the people on this boat.

Second class was just as much a dead end as third, which left only the first class lounge. Newt’s stomach dropped. If Credence had somehow wandered up there, things could go terribly wrong very quickly indeed. Without a pass, he would be stopped at the door and turned away. An unstable and hurting person could be set off by far less than rejection, or jokes about their class, the temerity of a poor boy trying to waltz into the stronghold of the ship’s most valuable passengers. 

Newt envisioned a hundred equally terribly scenarios: Credence manhandled away from the door and bursting into a cloud of burning black smoke, Credence using his power to break down the doors, Credence exposing himself in a panic to dozens of witnesses. There was no way to know if the boat was occupied only by muggles, after all. If there were any wizards in their midst, Credence’s escape would be over hardly after it began.

The boat was too small and cramped to allow for apparation, so good old-fashioned running had to do the trick. Panic, as always, was an excellent motivator. Newt would have won more races to the common room in school if he’d possessed such a strong sense of purpose to _move_.

He reached the base of the grand staircase and swung deftly around the corner of the railing, sprinting past several groups in eveningwear coming and going from the doors at the top. The room was stunningly beautiful, not that he had time to notice. The walls were paneled in gleaming oak, and a glass ceiling above refracted cold mid-atlantic starlight.

The doorman at the top of the stair was a burly fellow in the uniform of the Cunard line. His front was lined with gleaming buttons, and he wore the patch of the company proudly on his left shoulder - just the sort of fellow Newt was hoping not to run into.

He saw him coming from twenty feet away, and grasped Newt’s arm as he came to an abrupt stop in front of the dining lounge. Off to the left, the entry to the smoking room was equally well-guarded, and the door hung slightly ajar.

“Please,” Newt said, huffing for breath. “I am looking for a friend -”

“Hello, sir,” the doorman said. “Can I help you find your room? Third class is just down the steps and to the left.”

Newt’s hand shifted inside the broad sleeve of his jacket, sliding his wand into his hand. “I don’t think you understand,” he pleaded. “I am looking for a lost friend. He’s unwell, and I’m afraid he may have tried to wander in uninvited.”

“We have had no uninvited guests on this floor this evening,” said the doorman. “Save one.”

Newt twisted his arm from the man’s grip. That was all he needed to hear. His next stop would be the engine rooms in the deepest part of the ship, which would be trickier to penetrate. But why would Credence go there?

“Sir?”

Newt turned. Another man was standing at his side, and Newt recognized him as the man guarding the door to the smoking room.

“You have been invited to join a guest,” said the doorman. He opened an arm toward the other door. “If you’ll come with me, sir?”

Newt slid his wand back into his sleeve with his fingertips, but did not entirely let it go. With a last glance at the nicely pressed and overzealous doorman guarding the grand demesne of the first class dining lounge, he stepped through the open door to the smoking room.

Merlin’s beard, did this room need a few open windows. The room was choked with the thick-sweet fug of cigar and cigarette smoke. It was a melange of acrid and flavored odors, cherry tobacco and cuban, and Newt felt a bit sick.

The doorman pointed to a figure sitting at the back of the room. “That gentleman, sir.”

The gentleman in question had his feet kicked up on the chair opposite him, and his head lolled back against the back of the thickly upholstered chair. His most striking feature might be his casual posture, or his strikingly unusual hairstyle. His head was shaved at the sides with a swath of dark hair swept back down the middle, clinging close to his head, severe and strange.

Newt’s heart sank. The man at the table was wearing the same dark coat he had been when Newt first saw him on the ship just hours before, but it fit him better now than it had then, in a way Newt couldn’t really explain. He seemed utterly comfortable. On the table was a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. One was half-full.

“Hey!”

The man spotted Newt, and sat up straight. His face broke into a wide grin, savage as a nightmare, pure and unadulterated pleasure in the look on Newt’s face.

Credence Barebone arched a brow. “Well? You gonna come drink with me or what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. [Chapter title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aopqq205sgY).  
> 2\. The ship and [its layout](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/25/ca/76/25ca76ae83174c91a97d0ac32be7d841.jpg).  
> 3\. Probably should have posted this all in one go but w/e.  
> 4\. On tumblr, I am [here](http://baudlairean.tumblr.com/). The post for this chapter is [here](http://baudlairean.tumblr.com/post/156143481445/fic-beast-of-america-ch-2-bad-things-or-all).


End file.
